It’s got a bad rap, this outbound marketing technique. It’s the awkward, drunk, snack-pocketing relative at everyone’s wedding. He’s got to be there but nobody really feels comfortable about sending the invite.

We’re not sure why there’s such a stigma here. We KNOW cold emailing is great. We’ve said it before - and we’ll say it again - according to experts at McKinsey, "Email marketing boasts a median ROI of 122%, which is actually four times higher than the likes of social media or paid search."

It’s time to face the facts: Cold emailing is a hot marketing trend, and it ain’t going nowhereanytime soon. We’d like to think this is a good thing. After all, it really is the best way to reach out to new prospects in a bit to get them to try your products or services.

Here’s the rub: Without any prior relationship with the recipient, how do you make it work? A lack of personal touch has always been the major problem with cold emailing. There must be a way to make this approach more effective.

We’ve compiled a list of amazing email automation tools that take the tedium out of your cold emailing tactics. We tried a whole ton of these - some of them more effective than others - to come up with a list of the top 20 tools we think might work for you.

Top Cold Emailing Tools Tested by Us

Well-known for its email tracking and simple SalesForce integration, ContactMonkey have just hopped on the cold emailing bandwagon by launching their Mail Merge feature. Aside from these features, ContactMonkey offers a variety of nifty add-ons, including advance scheduling.

It’s all in the name here - which means using FollowUp.cc is a no brainer. Their main feature is following up, which is one of the cornerstones of a successful cold emailing strategy. If you’ve gone through the motions a couple of times, you’ll know that most cold emailing prospects only tend to reply after your 3rd or 4th follow up attempts - so it’s best to get your hands on a tool that helps you make the most of this process.

The team at SalesHandy have developed a tool that offers a number of fabulous features including email tracking, document tracking, link tracking, and more. It helps sales teams make data-driven decisions by showing file openings and time spent, engagement time, email notifications, and other figures that shed light on the effectiveness of your campaign strategy. SalesHandy also offers Mail Merge with Auto Follow Up, which enables you to send out your cold emails and build relationships with your prospects by sending regular follow up emails.

Rebump is a fantastic app that helps you manage your follow-ups. It will automate your follow-ups entirely and ensures an average of 30% response rate for its customers.It's one of the most prominently used Auto follow-up tools in the marketplace.

The idea behind Streak is that it enables you to run your whole business from your inbox. Using Streak makes it simple to manage your everyday processes; giving you the chance to close more deals, resolve more customer support tickets, and get all the most important things done.

Gmass enables users to send merge mail campaigns and follow-up emails using their Gmail account. The automatic follow-up emails can be sent sequentially (at a frequency of your choosing) until you get a reply.

If you want a straightforward solution to cold-emailing, Mailshake is where it’s at. The team at Mailshake provide users with top-notch content promotion, lead generation, first building, and link building. They also offer PR pitches and awesome guest post templates. It’s an all-in-one solution for your campaigns.

Reply is great if you want to maintain a personal touch with your sales outreach emails, which can be sequenced and A/B tested according to your needs. Reply’s major calling card is that they induce 1:1 conversions at scale and track client activities to help you keep a finger on the pulse of important trends.

MixMax is filled to the brim with tools that make every salesperson’s life a whole lot easier. From one-click meetings to MixMax sequences, advanced embedding, email tracking, and everything in between, this software is a time-saving powerhouse.

The team at Woodpecker have included a range of fantastic features like reply detection, cold email personalisation, opens and clicks tracking, and teamwork security, among others. Consider this one of the fastest email integration tools out there.

EasySendy helps you to automatically segment email subscribers into different categories according to your business requirements. In doing so, you’ll be able to send personalized emails to these categories without any fuss.

Close.io gets rid of the frustration associated with manual data entry. Using this tool, you’ll be able to send more emails and make sales calls effortlessly. This software is ideal for tracking all your communication with leads in one place.

Aweber includes a whole bunch of effective, easy-to-use features including email newsletters, a drag-and-drop editor, campaign implementation and monitoring, tagging, autoresponder follow-ups and more.

Yesware simplifies the sales prospecting process. This tool helps you set up email touch patterns, automated drip campaigns, and social selling, helping you target busy decision makers without any extra fuss.

With PersistIQ, you have the opportunity to scale the human element alongside the volume of sales emails that need to be sent out each week. This makes it easy to maintain that personal touch in your outbound marketing endeavours.

It’s all in the name with this one. Cliently helps you focus on your prospects and clients, keeping track of every sales- and marketing-related conversation in your inbox. This helps you hone in on leads and keep an eye on the necessary follow-ups.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a professional salesperson who is a stranger to MailChimp. At one point or another, we’ve all used this tool. With over a hundred email templates, this is one of the best tools out there for sending and monitoring newsletter campaigns.

Outreach is an all-in-one system that simplifies workflows for sales teams, making their internal processes more efficient. Using this tool, you can call or text from any part of the country integrate social media as a part of your sales and marketing processes.